It was hypothesized that instructing elementary school children to generate meaningful story relationships would increase reading comprehension and retention of low frequency reading materials. It was predicted that generation treatments, which involved various degrees of structural paragraph organization, would produce greater reading comprehension and retention than control treatments. To test this hypothesis, 366 fifth and sixth grade students were randomly assigned to experimental and control treatments. Tukey post-hoc comparisons showed that reading comprehension and retention were significantly increased (p.05) by the generation treatments in comparison to the control treatments in separate experiments for above and below average readers. The data suggest that in the design of reading materials for use in elementary schools, sizable increases in reading comprehension may be produced by emphasizing story organization in conjunction with instructing the student to generate story relationships. (Author)